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11 Prunella Clough: Unconsidered Wastelands Gerard Hastings 1. Whenever Prunella visited Gordon Hargreaves for drinks or for dinner, she would go to his little studio and assess his latest work. 2. Martin Ireland often accompanied Prunella on these 'break-ins'. They shared an interest in photographing decaying and dereliction. 3. See Cave, 1990, Frances Spalding Prunella Clough 'regions unmapped' 2012, p.212 no:129; Trellis 1991 p.62 4. Prunella Clough, from Unpublished Notes, 1958. Prunella was notoriously reticent about discussing the subject or the methods involved in her painting; she was guarded and reserved whenever conversation turned to her work and skilfully dismissed all attempts to analyse or examine her paintings. She granted only a handful of interviews, most notably to Bryan Robertson. I count myself fortunate, therefore, that she allowed me to interview her in 1982. I also listened attentively whenever she let conversation slip, perhaps over a drink with trusted painter friends like Robert Medley; it was then she was more likely to reveal her attitudes to painting. I occasionally sat in on her tutorials as she discussed composition and working methods. 1 My abiding memory of her is that creativity was an utterly serious endeavour, of crucial significance to her – and something never to be taken lightly. Prunella made use of materials that are not usually associated with the painter's studio; she acquired many of them on her 'shopping expeditions'. When she le the house, armed with her shopping bags, she was on a mission. She leaned into skips for a good old rummage, pulling out promising bits. It was impossible for her to pass a worksite without foraging through the debris. If the tide was out, she clambered down to see what flotsam and jetsam had been washed up on the Thames shingle. On the way to teaching she scrambled fearlessly into derelict buildings for a good magpie-mooch around the rusting guts of deserted factories and take her 'source photographs'. 2 At work, Prunella collected le over pieces of material, went through the studio bins or the theatre department trash, on the hunt for spare scrim, hand-made paper or textured fabrics. The journey home was as likely to involve stopovers at the plumbers' merchants and hardware outlets as it was visits to the art shop. Whenever she passed the newsagents and bargain shops on the North End Road she took photographs of the multi-coloured washing-up bowls and garish plastic toys. Back home her shopping bags were emptied and the useful booty spilled out: old work gloves, wire mesh, pieces of rusting metal, a plastic toy sword, fragments of Formica, a shard of coloured pottery or a steam-rolled tin can – overlooked and walked-past trinkets – from those unconsidered wastelands that we pass every day. These trophies were put in the studio or placed on the bleached kitchen table, for consideration. Eventually they assisted with her work – either as implements with which to make marks or as subject matter. Now and then, an objet trouvé might be incorporated into an assemblage or stuck to the surface of a painting. Along with sable brushes, tubes of Prussian Blue and Alizarin Crimson, Prunella's shopping bags might contain sandpaper, decorators' abrasives, tile grout, wallpaper scrapers, rollers and wire wool. Bits of bubble wrap and corrugated cardboard were practical in generating densely dotted backgrounds or cross-hatchings. Pieces of pin board, paper doylies, punched metal sheets, fragments of garden fencing came in handy as stencils to build up complex fields of coloured textures. 3 Not only did Prunella gather visual data in sketchbooks but also in more unconventional ways. Her diary pages carry thumbnail sketches, recording her day's progress on a painting and we can trace the compositional adjustments that occurred over the course of its maturation. Surviving sketchbooks contain written notations in an immensely complex language of description, analysis and metaphor that reads like an abstract poem: Difference between man-standing, and man-doing; latter easier but less the intention? Also, re enclosed etc., not so. E.g. idea of man/transformer (K. I.) linked only by wire grid (how?) consider final intention which is to be conveyed on larger scale. i.e. nature of urban building, old/tacky and new/ slick, (which implies urban skyline and sky density), and includes the non-directly industrial... 4 From the 1930s onwards Prunella always carried a camera to record 'those unconsidered wastelands' as she called them. She snapped at cracks in pavements, dockside cranes, wire- mesh gates, slagheaps, tarpaulins, piles of ropes and stains on walls – things usually considered